Doug Tabuchi

How does a Senior Product Manager go from layoff to landing a Staff Product Manager role with a significant compensation increase? Join us as we chat with Nora Hughes, a seasoned product manager with a decade of experience in the tech industry. Nora shares her journey from being laid off in October to navigating the challenging job market. She talks about her initial struggles, including the overwhelm of job searching during the holidays, dealing with COVID-19, and the loneliness that came with it. Nora discusses how she discovered the Intentional Job Search (IJS) program and her thought process before joining. She highlights the program's structure and quality and how it helped her regain focus, prioritize effectively, and build confidence in her job search strategy. In this candid conversation, Nora also reveals her aha moments, including the value of peer interviews and the comprehensive support from the IJS community. She explains how the program's personalized coaching and strategic guidance were pivotal in helping her land a dream role as a Staff Product Manager in AI and ML at a large public company, achieving a significant pay raise and working alongside best-in-class professionals. If you're curious about how the IJS program can transform your job search and career trajectory, this video is a must-watch. Nora's story is a testament to the power of structured support and intentional effort in achieving career success. Key Moments in this Episode ======================== 00:00 - About Nora 01:00 - Challenges before IJS 02:45 - How Nora decided to join the program 07:30 - Nora's experience in IJS 17:30 - Negotiations 20:00 - Her message for you https://lnkd.in/eHEBAxpQ

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It had been far too long since I last caught up with Andrew Lau, CEO & Co-Founder of Jellyfish, to get the latest on the company. We also discuss the results from their State of Engineering Management Report. In this video, we chat about: * Details about Jellyfish * Customer examples & use cases * Finding from their State of Engineering Management Report * The culture at Jellyfish * Why Jellyfish should be on your radar for your career

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I just wrote release notes for the last two weeks to share with Bullish and CoinDesk folks on Slack. I can't put the full set here, but I wanted to share a few: * Ad algorithm improvement to reduce ad density with the aim of having only 1 ad in view at a time, and on mobile, let people have a screen full of content with no ads. * The new price page template should launch in the next 1-2 weeks. Our initial tests show an increase in search impressions of 50%! Plus, they're sexier with more features. * We built some new geotargeting features that I'm pretty excited about. * We're testing some new solutions for translating content. * We're wrapping up design work for a new home page layout 🤘

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Maven is having a killer quarter after a strong last 12 months. People rarely share this publicly, so here's an insider look into how we've navigated product/market fit: Maven’s initial launch was wildly successful. We started a movement. The phrase we coined, “cohort-based course,” showed up in countless startup pitch decks. We were on a $4M GMV run rate in 3 months. It was intoxicating. After the launch energy faded, we faced reality. We had no product: we were hand-holding instructors behind the scenes. This resulted in a 73% instructor revenue retention rate, and many instructors were telling us we weren’t critical to their business. Today: It took 2 years, but we’re now at 120-140% instructor revenue retention. Our business is growing despite a tough market, and professionals are actually using (and loving) our product to speed up their careers. We made a few critical decisions that led to 3 big breakthroughs: Breakthrough #1: We started by looking at follower counts; now we focus on real professional expertise. Our first persona was creators with 100ks of followers, but Maven was often their 3rd or 4th priority. Simply put, they didn’t NEED us, but they were bringing in a ton of revenue. We shifted away from creators to experts, eventually losing 95% of our first $4M in course sales. This shift took 2 years, but it worked – Maven now has hundreds of “subject matter expert” instructors who have spent 10-15 years in their field. Today, Maven has its killer value proposition: we offer ambitious professionals access to the experienced operators to take their career to the next level. Lesson: Persona is key. Focusing on who really needs your product is more important than short-term traction. Sometimes the early signals are wrong, and you need to course correct. Breakthrough #2: We started as a platform; now Maven is a marketplace. When starting Maven, I envied the Substack business and modeled Maven off of it. Maven would provide software while the creator would bring the users. This was a failure of “business by analogy.” In the course world, instructors didn’t value software the way creators did in the newsletter world. They demanded we create a marketplace, and students were increasingly asking us why they couldn’t easily find great courses on Maven. I knew from my time at Udemy and Lyft how hard it is to build a two-sided marketplace, so I resisted this for 1.5 years of heavy internal debate. Eventually, we launched the Maven marketplace. Now, hundreds of thousands of students browse Maven’s courses to find something that can help them in their careers. 25%+ of all course sales come from Maven’s marketing, which has been critical to our instructors and students. Lesson: Find your own path. You can be inspired by other companies, but ultimately every market and situation is different. Be willing to change even the big things when your customer demands it. I reached LinkedIn's character limit so check the comments for the rest!

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I resonate with Kent Beck's insight on why creators often hesitate to release their projects: "By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback." The fear of failure or receiving negative feedback can paralyze decision-making. Everyone prefers to be associated with success, not setbacks. Do you find it difficult to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback? What helps you most in taking risky actions? For me, it's the attitude toward failure—being part of a kind, supportive team that embraces failure as a means to learn.

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Kayvon Beykpour was the long-time head of product at Twitter, and GM of Twitter’s consumer business up until the day the platform was acquired by Elon Musk. He originally joined Twitter in 2015 through the acquisition of his company, Periscope, which became the world's largest live video streaming platform and inspired every other social network to expand into video streaming. In our conversation, we discuss: 🔸 The story of being let go from Twitter after Elon’s acquisition 🔸 How he turned Twitter’s stagnant culture around 🔸 Advice for building consumer products 🔸 Why Periscope failed 🔸 Kayvon’s thoughts on the limitations of frameworks like Jobs to be Done 🔸 When to copy, when to innovate 🔸 So much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g2Zs56kh - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gUrVCPGX - Apple: https://lnkd.in/gh2zR7tG Some key takeaways: 1. Kayvon drove change at Twitter by questioning the “sacred cows,” or deeply ingrained assumptions about what must not change in a product. At Twitter, these were things like sticking to text-based content and limiting tweets to 140 characters. Kayvon treated sacred cows like a “built-in roadmap” of innovations worth testing. 2. Twitter accelerated cultural change and innovation through many small acquihires. Founders of acquihired companies led the teams behind Community Notes, Spaces, Super Follows, Fleets, Communities, Tipping, and more. Twitter acquihired entrepreneur types who were ambitious and then gave them responsibility and autonomy to develop new products. 3. To change Twitter’s product culture, Kayvon also focused on building alignment at the leadership level, telling a compelling vision and strategy story repeatedly, hiring entrepreneurial founders through acquihires to take big bets, and identifying who was “on the wagon” or “off the wagon.” But he admits they weren’t swift enough at making organizational changes. 4. Twitter made the mistake of internally competing with its own video platforms, such as Vine and Periscope, instead of integrating them seamlessly into the main product. 5. When deciding to copy a product, the North Star should be doing what’s right for the customer. Copying can be done in good taste or poor taste. With Spaces, Twitter sought inspiration from Clubhouse’s user experience but put their own spin on it and prioritized it as the #1 company initiative, having learned from their failure to move quickly enough with Periscope/Vine. 6. To get better at building consumer products, be a voracious user of products. Try new things, feel what works, what doesn’t, and what you like and don’t like. Hone your taste by consuming and learning from others’ creations. There’s no replacement for curiosity and having practice and muscle memory.

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👉 Building up a new podcast is *already* been an enlightening experience. Have had a chance to chat with some amazing folks, got some incredible feedback, and have a ton of ideas for how this series will proceed. I will say, the most exciting part of my recent podcast, "Building Products with Generative AI", is that there is a narrative that is building throughout each episode. I'm not going to reveal what that is just yet, but if you watch each episode, you'll start to notice a solid pattern!

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Quick update on Moxies progress: - ✅ Completed 1st prototype - Waitlist up ↗️ 275% in Q1 - SOLD OUT mother-daughter events - 1/4 way thru database warm up w 75k active email subs 💌 Momentum is growing: parents + girls care about a healthier digital future + want to be part of the solution! In fact in our latest survey: - 90% want to get involved in the building of Moxies in some way - 90% agree or strongly agree that there is a need for the Moxies app When we asked girls what features they wanted the most in a social gaming platform, do you know what the #1 request was? #1 Be part of a healthy digital community that promotes confidence and positivity Moxies is here to build digital literacy and create a healthy relationship with technology. Get on the waitlist to check out our prototype + be part of building with us! ➡️ www.moxiesx.xyz

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Is the product management job market headed for a shakeup in Q3? As a recruiter, I'm seeing signals that could reshape how companies hire - and how PMs navigate their careers. With over a 15 years of experience I've weathered market shifts before (hence the slowly greying beard), but… The landscape is evolving rapidly: • Some companies are tightening belts, others are aggressively expanding • New skills are suddenly in high demand • The investment shifts driving changes in hiring I'll be sharing my insights on these trends and more at the upcoming TopProds Q3 Product Management Talent Forecast alongside Chris Mason, Viktoria Korzhova & Ross Webb, MBA. This virtual event will equip both hiring managers and job seekers with actionable intelligence for Q3 and beyond. Don't let market volatility catch you off guard. Link in comments:

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We recently launched Klue Insights. And the team pulled just a few of the incredible pieces of feedback we've gotten from customers in the wild. Nothing fills my cup more than these kind of moments. It's an early indicator that what you've shipped really is going to change how our customers compete in the future. If you're in product marketing or competitive intel and don't know what Klue Insights is all about, here's the tl;dr 👇 1. Analyze your competitor's strengths and weaknesses from multiple sources. This means referencing customer reviews, win-loss interviews, and call recordings. 2. Conduct analysis in seconds, not weeks. Aggregate the 'so what' from these sources with just one click of a button. 3. Deliver these insights into battlecards for your revenue teams to use in competitive deals. After saving time sifting through win-loss transcripts and 1000s of reviews - you can then actually share these insights with the teams that need it most, your sellers. -- So many folks at Klue have been relentlessly building to shape the future of competitive enablement, and this feedback is just another shot in the arm towards our mission. To anyone that's taken Klue Insights for a spin, we appreciate you joining us for this ride. Can't wait to share what else will be coming in 2024 👊

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We launched VIP Loyalty last week. It's a big feature. You'd think we'd take a breather, stop shipping new stuff for a minute. You'd be wrong. VIP was big body of work and a critical new feature. It gives us a step function increase in how Raleon can deliver personalized loyalty across the customer lifecycle. I'd love to show you a demo if you think it could be a good fit for you store. Hit me up! But VIP was just the start to the week. 8 business days later, we've already: - Successfully launched loyalty programs for multiple 8-figure brands into production. - Including migrating two enterprise customers from a key competitor. - Shipped a new landing page embed for our customers (it's drag and drop, saves days of configuration work on the Shopify side, looks great, and we're already seeing strong engagement data) - Released a major expansion to our Analytics platform, increasing metrics on our key dashboards by close to 50% and adding new product level predictions to our Loyalty Copilot.  - Launched v2 of our integration to Klaviyo, expanding the marketing automation capabilities between the two systems (on top of the loyalty-based segmentation and personalization we already had in place). - Launched an integration to a new subscription plugin that is critical to one customer's retention strategy. - Shipped a new Checkout Extension for our Shopify Plus customers, giving deeper engagement opportunities throughout the customer journey - we have plans to add new personalization and AI recommendations here in the near future. If you're on Shopify Plus I'd love to share what we're doing here next. And honestly so much more (expanded support for custom CSS, new integration to support photo reviews, I could keep going). We tweak, enhance, and modify things in our product every. single. day. directly from customer feedback and needs. If you're a brand selling on Shopify, you will not find another company with this level of know-how, speed, and dedication to your success. 

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If you notice a difference in how internal teams react to your product launches, here’s one reason that might happen... Some teams view product launches like movie premieres. The work is done and the movie is playing in theaters. Now it’s now just a matter of making sure people know they can buy tickets. This can build tension between departments. Especially by stressing out your product marketing, customer, and sales teams. You’ll get the best results and highest morale if folks view launch day as a milestone, not the finish line. And now more of the team can get involved. Even the best features need some time to reach their audience. Often it's a mix of BOTH outreach and product improvements that helps you build awareness, and reach the next wave of customers. When you ship a feature, you still have to raise it – and yes, it takes a village. #productmarketing #saas #startups #b2b

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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."--Yogi Berra I find it so interesting how people ---smart people with business experience---often suggest there is 'no market' for this or that. See below from Lenny Rachitsky on the growth and size of the role of #productmanagement. Simply amazing. For a $100 per-month product to serve these folks, the TAM is half a billion. Yep, nothing there. Oh, and they all aren't in #software as some people seem to think. In a recent role I held I was told there was no market for product management software or services. It reminded me of the time I was told in 2011 after starting a cybersecurity threat intelligence company that there was no market for that. Today the global cybersecurity threat intelligence market is significant and growing rapidly. As of 2024, the market size is estimated to be approximately USD 8.15 billion, with projections indicating it will reach around USD 14.96 billion by 2029, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 12.90% during this period​ #innovation #productmanagement #growth #marketsize

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Ami Vora is the Chief Product Officer of Faire. Prior to Faire, Ami spent over 15 years at Meta where she was VP of Product and Design for WhatsApp (2B+ users), VP of Product for Facebook’s ads system (now a $130B business), and director of product at Instagram where she created Instagram's first ads platform. In our conversation, Ami shares: 🔸 Why execution eats strategy for breakfast 🔸 Using metaphor to rally teams around a shared goal 🔸 “Dinosaur brain,” “Toddler soccer,” and “hill climbing” 🔸 A pro tip for handling disagreement 🔸 Tips for working well with product-minded founders as a product leader 🔸 The story of Ami’s incredible 15-year journey from temp to VP 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gQasbCbp - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gQCjrhwn - Apple: https://lnkd.in/ghYTapTG Some key takeaways: 1. Execution eats strategy for breakfast: While strategy is undeniably valuable for guiding direction and setting goals, it’s the execution—the tangible implementation of those plans—that truly drives success. Without strong execution, even the best strategies can’t succeed. This means being willing to get your hands dirty, to tackle the mundane and sometimes tedious aspects of the work that lead to real results. Successful execution allows you to learn from both your triumphs and your setbacks, enabling you to refine and improve your strategy over time. 2. When handling high-stakes product reviews with executives (who are so inundated with information that they can't go deep on all of it, aka "dinosaur brain"), focus on distilling complex information into concise, actionable recommendations. By doing so, you not only clarify your recommendation but also empower execs to offer useful context, patterns, or insights at the right altitude. 3. When having a disagreement, use phrases like “Fascinating! You have to tell me more about why you think that” to show a genuine interest in learning. While everyone loves being right, delivering the best outcome is what truly matters. Put your ego aside, embrace curiosity, and collaborate to broaden your perspective and information set. 4. Use the “hill climb” metaphor to remind your team that moving from a local to a global optimum is like traversing hills and valleys. Imagine your product roadmap like climbing a mountain range, with your current solution being a local peak. Reaching the global optimum or the summit requires leaving your comfortable vantage on an arduous journey to explore other hills and valleys. Trying to play it safe by staying put means forfeiting your shot at reaching the global maximum. Use this analogy to remind your team that achieving the best outcome demands risk-taking and perseverance through challenges. Embrace these hurdles as crucial steps toward success, knowing each stride brings you closer to the summit.

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An early startup that we don't have the capacity to help asked what they could be doing to hire some good early engineers. Below is what I shared. I don't think companies want to hear that there's no secret stash of candidates and that it takes hard work to make hires. But it's the truth and also worth it! === I'm not sure if you're already doing this but I would suggest making a list of all the companies and teams that employ these engineers and systematically reach out via LI or email to engage them about this opportunity. Reaching out to ~10-15/day of the best engineers in the space will get you 3-5 high signal intro calls per week that over a few weeks/months should get you the few hires you're looking for. In addition, you can post the roles on LinkedIn and/or other engineering sites and also encourage referrals from your team. Regarding the latter, you can try to offer referral bonuses and also set up sourcing jams where you get some pizza or virtual Doordash and everybody mines their networks for good engineers to contact. This is what a recruiter would do to make these hires. Let me know if any of this prompts questions. Hope this helps and good luck out there. Hiring is most definitely a grind!! But also worth it when you're able to find and hire great people.

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I get approached by a lot of startups promising to fix my woes, but most of the problems I deal with in security today aren't VC-level problems. The downside of this is that there are a ton of problems in the security space that are too niche for anyone to fix at scale. There's a catch-22: The problems are too small for VC-backed companies The risk area is too large for small companies The security space has too many requirements for bootstrappers. One of the problems we have as security teams is that we like to reduce risk surface area; less is more. We also generally can't trust bootstrapped startups with our most sensitive data because they are too small, can't afford SOC2 or security tools, are a reliability risk etc. Most of these problems we fix ourselves with internal engineering teams, even though they are problems experienced by multiple companies, so there's a ton of duplicated effort across the industry. Realistically, though, small companies done right can be just as secure as big companies. Sure, they don't have dedicated security teams or tools, but starting a secure company has never been easier. Functionally, you can live off the land for a long time with a small select set of tools. I'd like to see a future where we make it easier and cheaper for bootstrappers to get started so I don't have to fix the same problems over and over again. 

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Tech Founders are at risk over one specific factor: Budget. Budgetary concerns always ellicit a knee-jerk reaction whenever it comes up in the conversation. It's seen as this thing that depends on many uncertain factors and can only be marginally controlled. Sometimes we go over-budget when launching a product, sometimes, the Economy gods favor us. --- Truth is, we can control it - far more than we realize. Though the Tech market is volatile, we can use Talent Acquisition strategies to curb the risk Retention holds over our budget. Think of the first trimester in your development cycle - you'll burn out your big talent needs, and then you won't need 'em. What if we could alter that? What if we could allocate specific resources for a specific timeline? Wouldn't that be more efficient? --- By working with a Nearshore Software Development provider, you get to improve both on the timeline and budget fronts. No more worrying about talent retention, nor hiring practices. You pay for what you need, and you get to free up a lot of budget. Invest in sound strategies, ditch the worn down perspectives. #Tech #Budget

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